If you want to get a good sense of how the world of churches is operating right now, church statistics are a great way to learn more. Statistics help highlight overall trends and concerning new movements, and this knowledge helps you find the best path forward for connecting more people with your church. In this article, we'll cover 20 church statistics ranging from tithing, hybrid church, attendance, and more.
It’s an interesting time to be a church leader. With so much conflicting news coming out of the church sector, it can be hard to figure out what to focus on to grow your church – or even to keep it healthy.
We’ve researched 20 interesting and surprising statistics that will help you shape your plans for the remainder of 2023 and beyond. We’ve broken them into six categories.
Statistics help you decide how to move forward, but they also help you reflect on your performance in the past. Remember that they represent general trends, so you’ll need to reflect on how your church fits in with each of these 2023 church statistics.
This shows us that your most loyal churchgoers appreciate the flexibility of the hybrid church model and that it may even be the reason they’ve stuck around. [Pew Research]
Online church statistics show that people appreciate the option to worship from home. Making the switch to a hybrid church, if you haven’t already, is easy. Check out our article Hybrid Church: Make A Smart Shift To A Modern Mindset for 8 steps to adopt a hybrid church model.
In the survey conducted by Gallup, it is evident that nearly half of the people who responded wanted to worship on their own. And only about 30% attended church in the last 7 days. This could be a sign for your church to offer flexible ways to attend and adopt a hybrid model.
If you can connect with these people who like to worship on their own through readily available content like recorded sermons, podcasts, mini-documentaries, and more, you’re more likely to build an ongoing relationship with them – and convert them into church members.
According to Faith and Leadership, churches with only in-person offerings experienced a decline of 15.7% in attendance. While those with hybrid offerings grew by 4.5%.
With the rise of working from home thanks to technology, people expect flexibility in other areas of their life, too. The best way to make the most of your hybrid offerings is to have a clear plan to communicate and connect with your church members.
Donorbox makes it easy to incorporate technology in your church to accept online tithes and offerings and boost donor engagement. You can use multiple methods such as QR codes, text-to-give, online recurring giving, event ticketing, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more to keep funds flowing to your church.
You can also easily add communication notes to each supporter record or use Moments to be reminded of key events like donation anniversaries, first-time donations, changes to recurring giving plans, and more. This can help boost that growth even more!
Converting church attendees into regular tithers can be tricky, and this number is definitely lower than most church leaders want.
Setting up recurring giving is the best way to get more regular tithers. Donorbox Recurring Donations are easy to set up on your end and your givers can self-manage their recurring plans.
You can add up to 4 donation intervals to your church donation form on Donorbox from a list of one-time, daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. You can also set a default choice and a recommended choice, which will mark your selection with a heart so donors know which option will best serve your church.
For example, St. Irene Byzantine Catholic Church offers four donation intervals on their form. One-time donations are the default, but they let donors know that weekly is their preferred donation interval for online tithing.
You should also add scriptures about tithing to your services to communicate just how important church giving is for your church and for honoring god.
Does this number from Nucleus ring true for your church? Do you have a system in place to find out just how much members are giving to your church?
It’s so vital to run regular reports to measure the effectiveness of your church fundraising. Donation management is key for churches since it will help you reevaluate your strategy for encouraging more donations. When you find out the average donation to your church and your members’ giving abilities, you can personalize your solicitations and customize ask amounts to increase overall giving.
On Donorbox, you can easily manage and track donations to your church. To find your average and gross one-time donation using Donorbox, go to “Donations” under “Manage” and filter your donations by “Intervals”.
Donorbox also has easy-pull reporting templates to help you further tackle your church-giving data. You can customize these reports to get just the info you need.
So, how does your average one-time donation compare to this statistic?
If this is the case with your church, too, you should try making it easy for people to give weekly and monthly. Recurring donors give an average of 42% more annually than one-time donors.
The first step to achieving success with recurring giving is to add donation intervals to your donation form. This will help church members see that you’re open to accepting weekly or monthly donations. With automatic deductions at regular intervals, these options are often desirable for your churchgoers as well. Plus, Donorbox lets your recurring donors login to their own donor accounts and upgrade, cancel, pause, and resume their recurring plans.
The second and most important step is to make it easy for church members to access your recurring donation form. You should leverage QR codes and text-to-give that will take your potential donors to your online recurring donation form easily and quickly.
Check out our blog of 10 successful text-to-give campaign examples where The Gathering Church put Donorbox Text-to-Give to use to redirect donors to its online donation form.
Bonus: We have 18 more church giving statistics on our Nonprofit Blog. Give them a read for more insights into how you can tackle various aspects of fundraising this year.
While this survey data from Gallup may spell out trouble for some churches, it’s representative of the modern mindset. The church should be about a connection to God, whatever that looks like to your congregation – and not necessarily a strict set of rules to follow.
This may also be why nondenominational churches have seen such growth in the last several years. It may be time to reevaluate your approach during your services to make your church more appealing to an audience with a different mindset.
This significant statistic suggests that churches may have a harder time expanding their congregation as time goes on.
One strategy you might take to combat this feeling of disinterest is to build a strong community in your church. After all, the church is about both religion and community relationships. So, if you highlight that aspect you may be able to convince people to attend your church with an open mind.
Pro tip: Consider hosting a fun church fundraising event to build your community. We have written a blog to get you started with a list of 15 engaging church fundraising events.
This data comes from a survey conducted by Gallup, and the change is no surprise given the generational attendance fluctuations churches are experiencing. But it shows a shift in the modern mindset away from the habit of regular church attendance.
In our experience-based economy, churchgoers are looking for value in the experience of church – they don’t go simply out of habit. How can you make your church experience more valuable?
Think of ways to make the church a more comfortable and engaging place for the younger members. This may include live streaming your church services, adding a digital donation box, livening up your church lobby, and setting up a giving kiosk at your church. Get creative and think of ways to attract and retain more members.
The churn rate, or attrition rate, refers to the number of people who stop attending your church. This data from ChurchTrac can be quite disheartening when churches find out they’re losing 10 to 15 out of 100 members every year.
Donor management is a great way to start reaching out to these lapsed churchgoers. If someone was giving at every service and then dropped off, you should be able to know why and reconnect.
With Donorbox, you can get triggered alerts when someone cancels their recurring plan. You can get in touch with them and add communication notes to their record on Donorbox for further reference.
Pro tip: Send your lapsed members a survey to understand what went wrong and what changes they’d want to see in your church. This would make them feel valued and help you incorporate effective changes in your church.
Gallup’s survey on religious preferences has provided deep insights into how people perceive religious services and the church. And this specific church statistic means that the job of the church has changed. No longer the main guidepost for religious people, the church should instead be about community and connection.
Consider how you can connect with your congregants in different ways, especially when you have a new attendee. Church connection cards and newsletters with interesting content are great ways to get started.
For a while there, all you saw was people leaving the church. But Barna’s research from last year suggests that, though millennials did leave, they’re now coming back – slowly.
Millennials are looking for community and modern ways to worship. Embracing a hybrid church model, finding exciting ways to fundraise like fun church events, and providing interesting content will help you convert these returned millennials into long-term congregants.
Gen Z is quickly becoming an even more elusive generation than the Millennials. This statistic by Millennial Outreach suggests a continuation of the trend of skepticism set by Millennials.
Similar to some of the other points we’ve seen in this article, it’s time for your church to evaluate what your churchgoers find most valuable about attending your church.
How can you reach younger members who may be experiencing these doubts? Our next stat could be one of the answers you’re looking for.
It’s so important to note that Gen Z is looking for a church that actively makes the community better. One of those ways is by helping the poor.
A great way to show Gen Z that you’re stepping in to help impoverished people in your community is to launch a crowdfunding campaign with a specific goal in mind. This creates excitement around your good work and uses social proof to encourage more people to give.
Check out how Jim Guinn Ministries raised over $2,300 with 12 donations via Donorbox Crowdfunding to provide medical care to impoverished communities.
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This data by Nonprofit Source is great news because it suggests that, although volunteering may be down across all sectors, those who do volunteer do so at their church.
Are you offering enough volunteer roles to entice as many volunteers as possible? Consider delegating even more to volunteers to grow your volunteer program and make them feel valued.
Try peer-to-peer fundraising as an innovative and modern church volunteering method. It helps your supporters feel more connected and involved with your church and enables your church to boost giving and outreach.
This statistic comes from the Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations (EPIC) report, an ongoing study of how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected churches. One of their areas of focus is volunteering.
Although these numbers are disheartening, they point to the trend we’ve seen throughout this article – that churches will have to do more to engage members and volunteers.
Providing more opportunities to volunteer can increase your annual volunteer hours logged. Unique and exciting volunteer options are more likely to appeal to younger generations, too, which can increase your rate of church members volunteering.
The above stat from The Unstuck Group indicates a vital aspect of church volunteering. It’s the need for churches to track the efficiency of their volunteer engagement.
Tracking how many of your church members volunteer will help you assess the quality of your volunteer program and plan your next steps. It will also help you target specific volunteer groups with different events, activities, and campaign needs.
Church burnout is real, and it’s exacerbated by inadequate compensation of key church employees. That’s why the majority of churches increased their salaries in 2022 to attempt to keep as many core staff members as possible.
Read Donorbox’s detailed guide on church salaries along with payscale analysis.
The cost of living is another huge issue church employees are facing. With rising inflation, many church salaries simply aren’t going as far as they once were.
Think of how the cost of living has changed in your area and consider bumping up your employees’ compensation to account for inflation – and keep them satisfied.
Church employees’ health matters. If they aren’t well, they can’t help do this important work. That’s why so many churches chose to increase health and dental benefits for employees.
Although church accounting should always be monitored closely, if you can allocate additional funds to amping up health benefits, your employees will appreciate it and remain loyal.
Sometimes it’s nice to break through all the noise about the state of churches and read some clear church statistics to get a pulse on what’s really happening.
These church statistics for 2023 paint a picture of changing times, increased pressure on churches, new financial challenges, and plenty of opportunities to connect in new and exciting ways.
We’re here for the ride with our new dedicated church fundraising pillar called Donorbox MinistryMatters. We have the tools, features, and services you need to handle new challenges and grow your church giving through a modern, digital approach.
Check out our dedicated articles and blogs on church fundraising. You’ll also have access to hundreds of nonprofit-related blogs, guides, and free resources over there to improve your fundraising efforts and donor management. Subscribe to our blog newsletter to receive a curated list of Donorbox’s best resources in your inbox every month.
Lindsey spent years wearing many hats in the nonprofit world. Whether she was helping arts nonprofits with their messaging and content, planning a fundraising gala, writing an NEA grant proposal, or running a membership program with over 400 members, she learned how to navigate – and appreciate! – the fast-paced world of fundraising. Now, she loves sharing those hard-earned lessons with the Donorbox community.
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Lindsey Baker Bower